Stocking Rate Has No Confounding Effect on the Use of Internal and Inert Markers to Predict Botanical Composition, Diet Quality, Degradability and Passage Rate Kinetics in Sheep

SIMPLE SUMMARY: Internal markers are components of diets recovered to different degrees in faeces of animals. These feed components maybe helpful in predicting diet selection, nutrient intake and digestibility in animals. The development of sustainable grazing management and practices to prevent the depletion of natural grasslands as a result of overgrazing depends on the knowledge of feed intake, chemical and botanical composition of diets selected and consumed by ruminants. Determination of the botanical composition of diets selected by free ranging ruminants by visual observation is time consuming and tedious, while the use of oesophageal cannulated animals is invasive and impairs animal welfare. Therefore, it is imperative to use non-invasive methods, such as internal markers to predict feed preferences and composition of diets that ruminants consume. However, it is unclear if the accuracy of results obtained using internal markers is confounded by other factors, such as stocking rate, which is expected to determine the availability and botanical composition of pasture, which, in turn, may exert its influence on the diet selected and consumed by grazing animals. The findings of this study, however, showed that stocking rates did not affect diet selection and nutrient intake in sheep, while a combination of internal markers can be used to estimate the quality of diet selected by animals under cafeteria feeding conditions, regardless of the stocking rate used. Thus, the use of modified acid detergent fibre, acid insoluble ash and acid detergent lignin contents in feeds achieved high accuracy and precision in estimating diets selected by sheep. This approach serves as a proof of concept that these markers can be also used in free ranging animals. ABSTRACT: This study investigated if there is any confounding effect of stocking rate on the use of internal markers to determine and predict the dietary ingredient composition, dry matter intake (DMI) and digestibility of diets consumed by sheep. Fifteen sheep were randomly allocated to stocking rate treatments of one (SR1), two (SR2), four (SR4) and eight (SR8) sheep per pen (space allowance: 31.04 m(2), 15.52 m(2), 7.76 m(2) and 3.88 m(2) per sheep, respectively) and fed ad libitum maize stover, sorghum stover and veld hay by supplying 110% of previous day’s intake. Sheep were rotated across the treatments in four periods of 10 days. The proportion of feeds selected and total DMI were similar across all stocking rate treatments. However, diets selected by sheep in SR2 had the highest digestibility compared to other treatments. The prediction of the effective degradability of dry matter using acid detergent fibre content achieved an accuracy of 84.6%. A combination of crude protein and neutral detergent fibre contents achieved 63% accuracy in the prediction of the rate of degradation of feeds. The use of acid insoluble ash (AIA) as an internal marker to predict nutrient intake, digestibility, DMI and dietary ingredient intake accounted for 84.3%, 81.2%, 53.0% and 64.1% of the variation, respectively. The predictions of dietary feed proportions and nutrient quality selected obtained with least squares procedure using a combination of modified acid detergent fibre (MADF), acid detergent lignin (ADL) and AIA accounted for 81.0% and 72.4% of the variation, respectively. In conclusion, regardless of the different stocking rate tested in this study, a combination of MADF, ADL and AIA as internal markers can be used to estimate diet and nutrient selection by sheep using the least squares procedure. Hence, these markers can be used to predict ingredient composition of diet, diet and nutrient selection, nutrient intake and digestibility in free ranging animals.